Well,.we finally got a break in the rain mid morning today, and even though there was a tiny bit of wet still on the roads, I headed out to do some tuning on the efi system. I generally got it leaned out two points right across the board, but I'm sure my cold start will be quite far out of whack, have to deal with that next time. I tried to get the A/For in the 13.5-14.5 range across the board, with the exception of getting it down into the 13's above 4K RPM. I spent a few hours on it, but it's running much leaner now and I feel I'm ready to run it through the emissions test so that I'm good to go for next year.

It felt good to put some miles on the Bronze today, and got a few thumbs up which always makes ya feel better. Dropped by Specialty and visited with Andy and Tracey, went and looked at a little lathe for my personal shop (and bought it) and then stopped by the Malconator's place and helped push his road race car into winter storage after he had it winterized.

Well my projects can get a bit more involved at my workshop these days. I bought a lathe - just a little guy. But it came available, my father was willing to help move it, the price was not bad, but there was a mechanical issue with the hi/low range selector, so it was priced accordingly. But a few hours later, I had it sorted out, and now once I get it wired in, I should have great little lather for 85% of most shop projects I do.

The machine isn’t new, made by a Taiwanese company that has been building CNC production equipment since the early 80's. This one was built in 1978, but does not appear top have many mile on is as there is no wear on the bed, no scars on the machined surfaces. It does both metric and imperial threads, has a thread chasing dial, a steady rest and a follower rest, and came with a a 6" 3 Jaw chuck and an 8" 4 jaw. The later will likely be the only chuck I'll ever use. At work, I think I can count on one hand how many times the 3 jaw has been in that lathe in 10 years, and my home shop will likely be no different. It appears I can swing 11" over the ways.

As a bonus, there was also a Z axis attachment for the cross slide - cool. I've never used one - always had a mill around. But you never know. What was strange is that no tooling, aside from a live center and a drill chuck (#2 taper), came with the machine. So I'll need to start from scratch there. I did get a new quick change tool post with 8 holders which is all still in its packaging and has never been used.

Pics of my new old lathe.

Byron

PS. Now about that mill of mine... I'm still keeping my eye out for a Bridgeport or similar style machine....

goichi1 wrote:Freakin' nice man!! I wish I had one, I would love to learn how to operate one....How much was it? I have seen prices all over the place so I'm curious....it sure looks cool!!

The reason I bought this one was that is was less of a pretend lathe, like many that you see at the discount tool places. It's still a hobby type lathe, but it has a real acme feed screw with proper half nuts (for threading), a thread chasing dial and can do both imperial and metric threads. This machine also has a separate feed screw, much like a proper industrial machine and the tapers in the head stock and tail stock are standard Morse tapers. This machine however has a variable speed drive with a high and low range – I’ve not yet used a lather like this, so I’ll have to get you some more feed back when I get it wired in and running.

I picked it up for $1000 – it’s 33 years old, obviouslt very little use as it didn't have niticable wear on the bed ways. But it was unknown if it would run or could be fixed. The head stock was locked, and wouldn't move. The company which made this machine has long ago moved into bigger/better CNC machines, so a parts source would likely be non-existent. So I took a chance there when I bought it.When at the sellers place, I did take the time to pop off the main spindle gearbox cover, and after about 30 minutes was able to identify the problem - the clutch on the main shaft would not disengage from the main spindle into low range. But I still had no idea how to fix it as I have never - in 20 years of being a machinist - had to disassemble a lathe machine I worked on. I guess I'm just not hard on machinery, so the learning curve was steep.

This morning I picked on the machine with the help of my father and his car trailer (thanks dad). It was a bitch to pick up at the other end, we brought an engine crane to pick the thing up with and place it on the trailer. I was sweatin’ bullets – it may be a small lathe, but I underestimated it’s weight – I’d put it at 5-600 lbs. It was really tippy on the engine crane. At my end it was much easier to unload as I have a forklift, and that machine is a blessing at times. This was certainly one of them.

This afternoon, after cleaning up and re-aranging my shop, I decided to jump in and I pulled the head stock apart from the drive end. I'll be honest - I took a guess at which end to start from and this seemed the path of least resistance. Picture 74-2 below shows the gears engaged in high range. When shifted into low range, the clutch uncouples from the main shaft (red box) and simultaneously a gear is shifted on the counter shaft and the drive is then reduced via the gears on the counter shaft back to the chuck at the RH side of the gear box - power shown in the green path.So the problem was that the clutch would not move on the main shaft, hence no uncoupling. So I managed to pull off the drive side, and using an aluminum drift managed to persuade the clutch off the main shaft. The next photo below will show how the material was peened around the drive key. This is the only drive key. A real lathe would have a splined shaft at this point, but it is what it is. I filed down the peened over section inside the clutch, and polished out the bore a bit. This would have been a much easier task if I had a lather to do it in! At any rate, I got the clutch to move smoothly on the main shaft, and proceeded to reassemble. The hardest part of the whole assembly was dropping the gearbox lid on and getting the two selectors to align with all three gears which they had to engage with - I really needed an extra couple of hands at this point, but I managed.

Sp now everything feels as if it works pretty well. I am a bit concerned with the two bearings I needed to pull out on this drive shaft though. During assembly, you push on the outer race, but during disassembly, a puller is required, and this means pulling on the inner race of the bearings - if they make noise, I’ll need to replace them. I took the numbers down (6013Z) while it was apart.

A lathe this size is a bit odd. Usually they are either much smaller and lighter duty, or a fair amount larger with similar design features. The hand cranks are still quite small, and it will be harder to “feel” as you machine, but I’m sure it’ll work fine. Can’t wait to get it up and running. And I’ll be looking for a DRO (digital read out) as well – I’ll likely pay more for the DRO than I did for the machine!

So I take it that it's single phase powered? That's cool that you got it fixed, I would have been lost!! I better get one that is already up and running, maybe one day....just no where to put one now! I need a big shop, that's the next thing on the list for me. Once we decide where we will be in two years, I can start collecting those nice tools!!

Mattndew76 wrote::shock: I am so envious!! Nice score on the lathe. I want to get one as soon as I can. Cant wait to see what you turn out.

Neither can I!

But I need to re-wire the shop before I can use it - I'll need to pull a 6 gauge wire some 160 feet from the panel to my plug where the lathe sits. I sure wish I was closer to the panel, but it is what it is. I was going to re-wire the machine and separate the 110 from the 220, but an electrician friend talked me out of bastardizign the machine. And as much as I want to get it going, he's right. So I have a little time just before X-mass set aside to pull the new wire in the shop. 6 gauge is huge, but that's what is already there, so we'll make it to code.

I never did post the emissions test results from the Bronze this year - flew through in a manner of speaking - I should have set it to pollute more, keep the averages up for the guys with big cams like I used to have...For the naysayers of EFI on old engines, well it works. It ain’t cheap, it ain’t easy and it certainly ain’t strait forward, but it works.

Having posted this, I should go down and get this year’s emissions test for Old Blue done on the following weekend; scan it and post these side by side- see how it compares.

Josh, I met up with Dan on Friday night, and got your set of disc brake brackets and adapters for the E brake cables -the parts look great. This will be a someday project. I realized last night that I'll need to do some playing around. The rotors installed on the hubs will put the tire outboard a bit further. I don’t know if's you've seen the Bronze, but I have barely enough clearance for a sheet of paper between the sidewalls of the tire and the flare.... I’ll have to think about that one a bit. But the parts look great, and I'll send out the E brake adapters with my next cad plating lot for the Greg Terry car.

You’ve been very professional with the part quality and your customer service.

My clearance issue has more to do with my wheel offset and the small flares that I run. Right now the sidewall is less than a 1/32nd clearance at the flare – a point that didn’t cross my mind until later – but there is always a solution - somehow. Your ZX 6 spokes should clear just fine. I ran the same wheel on my green 68 4dr - it was pretty low and I ran only 1/2 degree of negative camber on 195/60 tires, and if memory serves me correctly, I could have afforded the extra 4 or 5mm of spacer that these rotors will add. In my case, I may have to run a bit more negative camber (bleah!) or I might look at machining a bit off the back side of the hubs. Later this winter I'll take a look, see if those VTO's can afford a little thinning of the hub on my Retro 4's.

My good and long time friend Malcolm has been working on this set up for some time, and that's another story. But Malc asked me late last year if I would be willing to be the first car, outside his own fleet, to try out his system. He's been ice racing it, road racing it and running it on his own street car for a number of years - lots of development to say the least.

But I agreed to give it a shot, on the condition that he make it so that I could plug into the existing SDS wiring harness should I want to switch back. So, that's what Malcolm engineered. There is an adapter harness between his Setpoint ECU and my old SDS wiring harness. It doesn’t\t make for the neatest of installations when all tied back, but it works well.However there were some additions; the Setpoint ECU does sequential injector control, where the SDS is batch fired. So I needed to run new injector wires. I also needed a start wire installed, one constant power and one ground. While playing in the EFI wiring harness, I also had the chance to clear up that little red wire I had hanging all over the place for the LED fan light, and the wideband wires…

Without going into much technical detail as I’ll save that for Malcolm, here are some photos of the installation...